Food

Category archives for Food

Every Friday (more or less) there’s a “Faculty Social Hour” on campus. They have cheese and crackers, a fairly random assortment of beer, and a couple of bottles of wine, and various faculty come by to wind down a bit at the end of the week. It’s a chance to socialize a little with people…

A counterpoint to Monday’s question about tea: The Super Bowl is Sunday, and a look in the fridge shows that I’m low on beer. What sort of beer should I buy to drink with the game? Leave your suggestions in the comments.

… or, Emmy’s Best Thanksgiving Ever! We did the traditional turkey-and-trimmings dinner Saturday with both sets of parents. Again, we brined the turkey overnight, following the Good Eats recipe, and other than a small glitch with the thermometer placement, everything went very well. The turkey was nicely roasted, moist, and juicy. And that’s where the…

While we’re being all charitable, here’s a link to FreeRice’s charity vocabulary quiz. It’s pretty simple: They give you odd words, you guess the meanings, and for each word you get right, they donate 10 grains of rice to an international aid agency. Do you have a large vocabulary? Are you looking for an Internet-based…

As noted here in the past, I had horrible stomach problems for a good chunk of last year. This was diagnosed as “Gastro-Esophageal Reflux Disease” or “GERD,” which basically amounts to “Your stomach hurts.” After a number of deeply unsatisfactory appointments with a gastroenterologist, and some tests about which the less said the better, it…

I was just reminded again of a mysterious thing in Yokohama, that some readers may be able to help with. One of the first nights we were in Yokohama, I went up to the bar on the 70th floor, just to see what it was like. I was neither cool enough nor rich enough to…

At dinner with my parents last night, we were talking about the dinners at Sumiyoshi, the ryokan we stayed at in Takayama. I haven’t gotten around to uploading those pictures yet, but I dug this one out: It’s not the best picture of Kate, but she does provide a sense of scale… It was a…

Daniel Davies stakes out a controversial position at Crooked Timber: I tend to regard myself as Crooked Timber’s online myrmidon of a number of rather unpopular views; among other things, as regular readers will have seen, I believe that the incitement to religious hatred legislation was a good idea (perhaps badly executed), that John Searle…

Books

You've read the blog, now try the books:

Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist will be published in December 2014 by Basic Books. "This fun, diverse, and accessible look at how science works will convert even the biggest science phobe." --Publishers Weekly (starred review) "In writing that is welcoming but not overly bouncy, persuasive in a careful way but also enticing, Orzel reveals the “process of looking at the world, figuring out how things work, testing that knowledge, and sharing it with others.”...With an easy hand, Orzel ties together card games with communicating in the laboratory; playing sports and learning how to test and refine; the details of some hard science—Rutherford’s gold foil, Cavendish’s lamps and magnets—and entertaining stories that disclose the process that leads from observation to colorful narrative." --Kirkus ReviewsGoogle+

How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog is published by Basic Books. "“Unlike quantum physics, which remains bizarre even to experts, much of relativity makes sense. Thus, Einstein’s special relativity merely states that the laws of physics and the speed of light are identical for all observers in smooth motion. This sounds trivial but leads to weird if delightfully comprehensible phenomena, provided someone like Orzel delivers a clear explanation of why.” --Kirkus Reviews "Bravo to both man and dog." The New York Times.

How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is published by Scribner. "It's hard to imagine a better way for the mathematically and scientifically challenged, in particular, to grasp basic quantum physics." -- Booklist "Chad Orzel's How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is an absolutely delightful book on many axes: first, its subject matter, quantum physics, is arguably the most mind-bending scientific subject we have; second, the device of the book -- a quantum physicist, Orzel, explains quantum physics to Emmy, his cheeky German shepherd -- is a hoot, and has the singular advantage of making the mind-bending a little less traumatic when the going gets tough (quantum physics has a certain irreducible complexity that precludes an easy understanding of its implications); finally, third, it is extremely well-written, combining a scientist's rigor and accuracy with a natural raconteur's storytelling skill." -- BoingBoing